Enterprises deal with a large number of papers related to the various kinds of agreements with their suppliers and customers. There is a need to preserve these documents in a proper condition for a pre-specified number of years in order to successfully carry out business. There are also the other kinds of legal documents that need to be preserved for a longer period of time as part of statutory requirements. These documents need to be taken out for modification purposes: additional signatures and additional sheets get added to an existing version of the documents. Auditing requirements and several business transactions necessitate the usage of these documents quite frequently. Manual handling of the documents for these purposes lead to the reduction in the useful life of the documents. However, statutory requirements and ongoing business relationships demand the preservation of the documents for a much longer period of time. Enterprises such as banks also deal with a large volume of paper documents. It is important to ensure that the documents received by a bank from its customers are stored in a secured way and returned back in the best possible conditions. Typically, in a bank, an identified branch offers the safe custody services to handle the documents of multiple branches of the bank.
Consider a business scenario involving an enterprise and a consultant. The consultant enters an agreement with the enterprise to provide consulting services and an agreement to this effect is reached between the two parties, and a suitable non disclosure agreement (NDA) and memorandum of understanding (MoU) are drafted for business and legal purposes. The initial term of validity of these two agreements is two years, and the agreements are appropriately signed and are stored. On providing the services to the enterprise, the consultant raises an invoice on the enterprise for payment purposes. Internally, within the enterprise, the invoice processing involves, apart from other documents such as work order and approvals, a copy of the MoU needs to be attached as a support document for the received invoice. This calls for obtaining a copy of the MoU and during such manual copying, the document needs to be handled carefully. As business relationship matures, it is required to extend the previously signed NDA and MoU. This requires, possibly adding an addendum to the original documents. Again, it is required to handle the documents carefully.
Under conditions when a soft copy of a document is maintained, with time, it becomes difficult to ensure that several copies are consistent with the original hard copy. Redundant copies create data integrity issues. Another equally important integrity issue arises in multi-office enterprises. In such an enterprise, typically, agreements are initiated by the individual offices, and are centrally controlled and managed by the head office. The documents are maintained centrally and it is required to keep track of the several agreements that get generated from the several branch offices. It is essential to maintain the same in a secured place due to the company confidential nature of these documents. On account of these factors, there is a need for securely storing both hard and soft forms of the documents so that (a) both soft and hard forms of the documents are available when needed; (b) consistency between soft and hard forms is maintained; (c) multiple document versions are tracked and managed; (d) controlled access is provided to both soft and hard forms of the documents; and (d) audit trails are maintained to ensure confidentiality of the stored documents.
Automating the indexing and archiving of paper documents requires the management of (a) scanners, to ensure that a reliable soft copy gets generated and to support audit verification, (b) printers, to ensure that a hard copy gets printed on demand, (c) vaults, to ensure that the original hard copy gets securely stored, (d) eject bins, to ensure that the original hard copy gets delivered on demand, and (e) scanned soft copies of paper documents, to ensure that multiple copies of a paper document get generated without resorting to the multiple times scanning of the original document.